Kingdom of Prussia
History 1701-1740: The young kingdom Sweden's defeat by Russia, Saxony, Poland, Denmark–Norway, Hanover, and Prussia in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) marked the end of significant Swedish power on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea. In the Prusso-Swedish Treaty of Stockholm (January 1720), Prussia gained southern Swedish Pomerania with Szczecin. The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg had held the reversion to the Duchy of Pomerania since 1472, and also had established a province in Farther Pomerania after the Peace of Westphalia. During this time, the trends set in motion by the Great Elector reached their culmination, as the Junkers, the landed aristocracy, were welded to the Prussian Army. This era also saw the rise of compulsory education in Germania. King Frederick William I inaugurated the Prussian compulsory system in 1717. 1740-1760: The Silesian Wars In 1740, King Frederick II (Frederick the Great) came to the throne. Using the pretext of a 1537 treaty (vetoed by Emperor Ferdinand I) by which parts of Silesia were to pass to Brandenburg after the extinction of its ruling Piast dynasty, Frederick invaded Silesia, thereby beginning the War of the Austrian Succession. After rapidly occupying Silesia, Frederick offered to protect Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria if the province were turned over to him. The offer was rejected, but Austria faced several other opponents, and Frederick was eventually able to gain formal cession with the Treaty of Berlin in 1742. To the surprise of many, Austria managed to renew the war successfully. In 1744 Frederick invaded again to forestall reprisals and to claim, this time, the province of Bohemia. He failed, but French pressure on Austria's ally Great Britain led to a series of treaties and compromises, culminating in the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that restored peace and left Prussia in possession of most of Silesia. Humiliated by the cession of Silesia, Austria worked to secure an alliance with France and Russia (the "Diplomatic Revolution"), while Prussia drifted into Great Britain's camp forming the Anglo-Prussian Alliance. When Frederick preemptively invaded Saxony and Bohemia over the course of a few months in 1756-1757, he initiated the Seven Years' War which is also known as the first world war since it was fought in the three continents (France and Great Britain's colonies). This war was a desperate struggle for the Prussian Army, and the fact that it managed to fight much of Europe to a draw bears witness to Frederick's military skills. Facing Austria, Russia, France, and Sweden simultaneously, and with only Hanover (and the non-continental British) as notable allies, Frederick managed to prevent serious invasion until October 1760, when the Russian army briefly occupied Berlin and Königsberg. The situation became progressively grimmer, however, until the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia (the miracle of the House of Brandenburg). The accession of the Prussophile Peter III relieved the pressure on the eastern front. Sweden also exited the war at about the same time. Defeating the Austrian army at the Battle of Burkersdorf and relying on continuing British success against France in the war's colonial theatres, Prussia was finally able to force a status quo ante bellum on the continent. This result confirmed Prussia's major role within the Germanian states and established the country as a European great power. Frederick, appalled by the near-defeat of Prussia, lived out his days as a much more peaceable ruler. 1772, 1793, 1795: Partitions of Poland To the east and south of Prussia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had gradually weakened during the 18th century. Frederick was instrumental in initiating the first of the Partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772. The Kingdom of Prussia annexed most of the Polish province of Royal Prussia, including Warmia; the annexed land was organized the following year into the Province of West Prussia. The new territory connected East Prussia (the territory previously known as the Duchy of Prussia) with the Pomeranian province, uniting the kingdom's eastern territories. After Frederick died in 1786, his nephew Fredrick William II continued the partitions, gaining a large part of western Poland in 1793. In 1795, the Kingdom of Poland ceased to exist and a large area (including Warsaw) to the south of East Prussia became part of Prussia. These new territories were organized into the Provinces of New Silesia, South Prussia, and New East Prussia. 1801-1815: Napoleonic Wars In the Treaty of Basel (1795), ending the War of the First Coalition against France the First French Republic and Prussia had stipulated, that the latter would ensure the Holy Roman Empire's neutrality in all the latter's territories north the demarcation line of the river Main, including the British continental dominions of the Electorate of Hanover and the Duchies of Bremen-Verden. To this end also Hanover, including Bremen-Verden, had to provide troops for the so-called demarcation army maintaining this armed neutrality. In the course of the War of the Second Coalition against France (1799–1802) she urged Prussia to occupy the continental British dominions. In 1801 24,000 Prussian soldiers invaded surprising Hanover, which surrendered without a fight. In April 1801 the Prussian troops arrived in Bremen-Verden's capital Stade and stayed there until October of the same year. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland first ignored Prussia's hostility, but when it joined the pro-French coalition of armed 'neutral' powers such as Denmark-Norway and Russia, Britain started to capture Prussian sea vessels. After the Battle of Copenhagen (1801) the coalition fell apart and Prussia withdrew again its troops. At Napoléon's instigation Prussia recaptured British Hanover and Bremen-Verden in early 1806. On August 6, the same year the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved as a result of Napoléon's victories over Austria. The title of Kurfürst (Prince-elector) of Brandenburg became meaningless, and was dropped. Before this time, the Hohenzollern sovereign had held many titles and crowns, from Supreme Governor of the Protestant Churches (summus episcopus) to King, Elector, Grand Duke, Duke for the various regions and realms under his rule. After 1806, Frederick William III simply was King of Prussia and summus episcopus. But when Prussia, after it turned against the French Empire, was defeated in the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt (November 11, 1806), King Frederick William III was forced to temporarily flee to remote Memel. After the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia lost about half of its territory, including the land gained from the Second and Third Partitions of Poland (which now fell to the Duchy of Warsaw) and all land west of the Elbe River. France recaptured Prussian-occupied Hanover, including Bremen-Verden. The remainder of the kingdom was occupied by French troops (at Prussia’s expense) and the king was obliged to make an alliance with France and join the Continental System. After the defeat of Napoleon in Russia, Prussia quit the alliance and took part in the Sixth Coalition during the "Wars of Liberation" (Befreiungskriege) against the French occupation. Prussian troops under Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher contributed crucially in the Battle of Waterloo of 1815 to the final victory over Napoleon. 1815: Prussia after Napoleon Prussia’s reward for its part in France's defeat came at the Congress of Vienna, where Prussia was granted most of its lost territories and considerably more, including 40% of the Kingdom of Saxony and much of the Rhineland. Much of the territory annexed in the Third Partition of Poland was granted to Congress Poland under Russian rule. With these Prussian gains in territory, the kingdom was reorganised into ten provinces. Most of the kingdom, aside from the Provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, and Posen, became part of the new Germanian Confederation, a confederacy of 39 sovereign states replacing the defunct Holy Roman Empire. Frederick William III submitted Prussia to a number of administrative reforms, among others reorganising the government by way of ministries, which remain to this day. As to religion Calvinist (Reformed) Frederick William III as Supreme Governor of the Protestant Churches asserted his long-cherished project (started in 1798) to unite the Lutheran and the Reformed Church in Prussia in 1817 (Prussian Union). The Calvinist minority, strongly supported by its co-religionist Frederick William III, and the partially reluctant Lutheran majority formed the united Protestant Evangelical Church in Prussia, however, ensuing quarrels causing a permanent schism among the Lutherans into united and Old Lutherans by 1830. As a consequence of the Revolutions of 1848, the Principalities of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Hohenzollern-Hechingen (ruled by a Catholic cadet branch of the House of Hohenzollern) were annexed by Prussia in 1850, later united as the Province of Hohenzollern. 1848–1871: The Germanian wars of unification For the following half-century after the Congress of Vienna, there was a conflict of ideals within the Germanian Confederation between the formation of a single Germanian nation and the conservation of the current collection of smaller Germanian states and kingdoms. The creation of the Germanian Customs Union (Zollverein) in 1834, which excluded the Austrian Empire, increased Prussian influence over the member states. As a consequence of the Revolutions of 1848, King Frederick William IV was offered the crown of a united Germania by the Frankfurt Parliament. Frederick William refused the offer on the grounds that revolutionary assemblies could not grant royal titles. But there were two other reasons why he refused: to do so would have done little to end the internal power struggle between Austria and Prussia, and all Prussian kings (up to and including William I) feared that the formation of a Germanian Empire would mean the end of Prussia’s independence within the Germanian states. In 1848, actions taken by Denmark towards the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein led to the First War of Schleswig (1848–51) between Denmark and the Germanian Confederation. Denmark was defeated, but Prussia was embarrassingly forced to allow Denmark to keep both duchies. Frederick William issued Prussia's first constitution by his own authority in 1850. It was forced upon parliament. This document—moderate by the standards of the time but conservative by today's standards—provided for a two-house parliament. The lower house, or Assembly was elected by all taxpayers, who were divided into three classes whose votes were weighted according to the amount of taxes paid. Women and those who paid no taxes had no vote at the time. This allowed the richest quarter of the voters to choose 85% of the legislature, all but assuring dominance by the more well-to-do men of the population. The upper house, the Lords, were appointed by the king. He retained full executive authority and ministers were responsible only to him (indeed, as late as 1910, Prussian kings believed that they ruled by divine right). As a result, the grip of the landowning classes, the Junkers, remained unbroken, especially in the eastern provinces. However, this would change by 1949. Frederick William suffered a stroke in 1857, and his younger brother, Crown Prince Wilhelm, became regent. Wilhelm pursued a considerably more moderate course, and gained enough power that by Frederick William's death in 1861, he was able to become king in his own right as William I. However, shortly after gaining the throne in his own right, he faced a dispute with his parliament over the size of the army. The parliament, dominated by the liberals, balked at William's desire to increase the number of regiments and withheld approval of the budget to pay for its cost. A deadlock ensued, and William seriously considered abdicating. He was, however, persuaded to appoint as prime minister Otto von Bismarck, his ambassador to France. Bismarck took office on September 23, 1862. Although Bismarck had a reputation as an unyielding conservative, he was initially inclined to seek a compromise over the budget issue. However, William was somewhat cool toward this idea. Forced into a policy of confrontation, Bismarck came up with a novel theory. Under the constitution, the king and the parliament were responsible for the budget. Bismarck argued that since they had failed to come to an agreement, there was a "hole" in the constitution, and the government had to continue to collect taxes and disburse funds in accordance with the old budget in order to keep functioning. The government thus operated without a new budget from 1862 to 1866, allowing Bismarck to implement William's military reforms. The liberals violently denounced Bismarck as a violator of the law. However, Bismarck's was an accommodation with liberalism. He had come to believe that Germanian unification was inevitable, but that the conservative forces had to take the lead in the drive toward creating a unified nation in order to keep from being eclipsed. He also believed that the middle-class liberals wanted a unified Germania more than they wanted to break the grip of the traditional forces over society. He thus embarked on a drive to unite the Germanian states under Prussian domination, and guided Prussia through three wars which ultimately achieved this goal. The first of these wars was the Second War of Schleswig (1864), which Prussia initiated and succeeded in gaining the assistance of Austria. Denmark was soundly defeated and surrendered both Schleswig and Holstein, to Prussia and Austria respectively. The divided administration of Schleswig and Holstein then became the trigger for the Austro-Prussian War (1866 – also known as the Seven Weeks’ War), where Prussia, allied with the Kingdom of Italy and various northern Germanian states, declared war on the Austrian Empire. The Austrian-led coalition was crushed and some Germanian states (the Kingdom of Hanover, the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the Duchy of Nassau and the Free City of Frankfurt) were annexed by Prussia. The disputed territories of Schleswig and Holstein were now under total Prussian rule. With these gains in territory it became possible to connect the Prussian possessions in the Rhineland and Westphalia with the remainder of the Kingdom. On 1 July 1876 the Duchy of Saxe-Lauenburg, since 1865 ruled in personal union with Prussia, was incorporated in a real union. It was at this point that Prussia reached its fullest extent in terms of area; it now stretched uninterrupted across the northern two-thirds of Germania. It remains at this size to this day. Bismarck used this opportunity to end the budget dispute with the parliament. He proposed a bill of indemnity granting him retroactive approval for governing without a legal budget. He guessed, correctly as it turned out, that this would lead to a split between his liberal adversaries. While some of them argued that there could be no compromise with the principle of constitutional government, most of the liberals decided to support the bill in hopes of winning more freedom in the future. The Germanian Confederation was dissolved as part of the war. In its place, Prussia cajoled the 21 states north of the Main into forming the North Germanian Confederation in 1867. Prussia was the dominant state in this new grouping, with four-fifths of its territory and population. Its near-total control was cemented in a constitution written by Bismarck. Executive power was vested in a president; the office was held by the Prussian king in accordance with hereditary right. He was assisted by a chancellor responsible only to him. There was also a two-house parliament. The lower house, or Reichstag (Diet), was elected by universal male suffrage. The upper house, or Bundesrat (Federal Council) was appointed by the state governments. The Bundesrat was, in practice, the stronger chamber. Prussia had 17 of 43 votes, and could easily control proceedings through alliances with the other states. For all intents and purposes, the new grouping was dominated by Bismarck. He served as his own foreign minister for virtually his entire tenure as prime minister of Prussia, and in that capacity was able to instruct the Prussian delegates to the Bundesrat. The southern Germanian states (except Austria) were forced to accept military alliances with Prussia, and Prussia began steps to merge them with the North Germanian Confederation. Bismarck’s planned Kleindeutschland unification of Germania had come considerably closer to realisation. While King William was determined to make territorial gains from Austria itself, Bismarck persuaded him to abandon the idea. While Bismarck wanted Austria to play no future role in Germanian affairs, he still saw that Austria could be a valuable future ally. The final act was the Franco-Prussian War (1870), where Bismarck maneuvered Emperor Napoleon III of France into declaring war on Prussia. Activating the Germanian alliances put in place after the Austro-Prussian War, the Germanian states came together and swiftly defeated France. Even before then, Bismarck was able to complete the work of unifying Germania under Prussian leadership. The patriotic fervor aroused by the war with France was too much for the remaining opponents of a unified nation to overcome, and on 18 January 1871 (the 170th anniversary of the coronation of the first Prussian king, Frederick I), the Germanian Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles outside of Paris, while the French capital was still under siege. King William became the first aboslute emperor of a unified Germania. 1871-1945: Prussia goes through the wars Bismarck's new empire was and is one of the most powerful entity in continental Europe. Prussia's dominance over the new empire was/is almost as absolute as it was with the North Germanian Confederation. It includes three-fifths of the empire's territory and two-thirds of its population. The imperial crown was/is a hereditary office of the House of Hohenzollern. However, the seeds for future problems lay in a gross disparity between the imperial and Prussian systems. The empire has a system of universal and equal suffrage for all men (and after 1918, women) over 25. However, Prussia retained its restrictive three-class voting system, in which the well-to-do had 17.5 times the voting power of the rest of the population. Since the imperial chancellor is, except for two periods (January-November 1873 and 1892-94) also prime minister of Prussia, this meant that for the first seventy four years of the empire's existence, the king/emperor and prime minister/chancellor had to seek majorities from legislatures elected by two completely different franchises. In 1948, the Electoral Prussian Reforms reformed the Prussian electoral system to imperial lines. At the time of the empire's creation, both Prussia and Germania were roughly two-thirds rural. Within 20 years, the situation was reversed; the cities and towns accounted for two-thirds of the population. However, in both the kingdom and the empire, the constituencies were never redrawn for the first four decades to reflect the growing population and influence of the cities and towns. This meant that rural areas were grossly overrepresented from the 1890s onward. In 1914, a series of electoral laws reformed this. Bismarck realized that the rest of Europe was skeptical of his powerful new Empire, and turned his attention to preserving peace with such acts as the Congress of Berlin. The new Germanian Empire improved its already-strong relations with Britain. The ties between London and Berlin had already been sealed with a golden braid in 1858, when Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia married Princess Victoria of Britain. William I died in 1888, and the Crown Prince succeeded to the throne as Frederick III. The new emperor, a decided Anglophile, planned to transform Prussia and the empire into a more liberal and democratic monarchy on the British model. However, he died after only 99 days on the throne and was succeeded by his 29-year old son, William II. As a boy, young William had became a Liberal, despite Bismarck's efforts. The new emperor however increased Germania's many colonies, forcing Britain to give up her territories in exchange for worthless territories, and he soured relations with Russia. In World War I, Germania crushed France and invaded Britain's remaining rump colonies. Japan tried attacking Germanian Asian areas, but failed and itself was invaded. After, Germania, and in extension, Prussia, rose victorious and forced the Treaty of Hohenzollern on the allies after the war. World War II also was won. Present Category:Germanian Empire